Sophie Gray | |
|---|---|
 Portrait of a Young Lady, Millais's 1857 painting of Sophie Gray | |
| Born | Sophia Margaret Gray (1843-10-28)28 October 1843 |
| Died | 15 March 1882(1882-03-15) (aged 38) |
| Nationality | British |
| Known for | Model for the pre-Raphaelite painterJohn Everett Millais |
| Spouse | |
| Children | Beatrix Ada Caird |
| Relatives | Effie Gray (sister) |
Sophia Margaret "Sophie"Gray (28 October 1843 – 15 March 1882), later Sophia Margaret Caird, was a Scottish model for her brother-in-law, thePre-Raphaelite painterJohn Everett Millais. She was a younger sister ofEuphemia "Effie" Gray, who married Millais in 1855 after the annulment of her marriage toJohn Ruskin. The spelling of her name was, after around 1861, sometimes "Sophy," but only within the family. In public she was known as Sophie and later in life, after her marriage, as Sophia.
From the late 1860s, she suffered from a mental illness which seems to have involved a form ofanorexia nervosa.[citation needed] In 1873, she married the Scottish entrepreneurJames Caird and together they had a daughter. She died in 1882, probably as a result of her anorexia.[citation needed]
Sophie Gray was born in October 1843 to Sophia Margaret Gray,née Jameson (1808–1894), and George Gray (1798–1877), a Scottish lawyer and businessman. Her maternal grandfather, Andrew Jameson, becameSheriff-substitute ofFife.[1] Effie Gray (1828–1897), known initially to the family as "Phemy," was the first of fifteen children, and Sophie was the tenth—three sisters, one also named Sophia Margaret, predeceased her. Two of her five elder brothers died before her birth and two passed away before she was seven.[2]
The family lived atBowerswell, a house re-built in 1842 near the foot ofKinnoull Hill, south-east ofPerth.[1] As a child, Gray frequently visited and stayed with her sister Effie in London with her husband, the critic and artistJohn Ruskin. To an extent Effie, who was fifteen years older than Sophie, acted as a kind of second mother to her and Effie's other siblings. From a young age, Gray was exposed to the increasingly strained circumstances of the Ruskins' unconsummated marriage.[3] In fact, through her increasing presence in the Ruskin household, Gray may, in some respects, have been a convenientchaperone for her elder sister, whose largely independent social life tended to attract comment.[1][4][a] According to Effie, Ruskin's manservant, Frederick Crawley, expressed to Gray his concern that other servants might spread gossip "all overCamberwell."[citation needed]
Gray's governess of three years, a French woman named Delphine, appears to have been discharged by the Grays in March 1854 because of Gray's habit of confiding in her.[4]
On 25 April 1854 Effie left her husband on the pretence of visiting her parents in Scotland. Gray had been staying with the Ruskins, at their home inHerne Hill since just after Christmas 1853 and appears to have been complicit in her sister's flight. She and Effie were seen off in silence by Ruskin[1][4] at the recently openedKing's Cross station, where, accompanied by Crawley,[5] they boarded a train forEdinburgh. However, Gray alighted atHitchin, Hertfordshire where her parents were waiting. Her mother took her place on the train, while she and her father returned to London to deliver a package from Effie to her solicitors. That evening a citation ofnullity was delivered to Ruskin, together with certain effects such as Effie's wedding ring and her keys.[6][b] The following day Gray and her father returned to Scotland by steamer.
Effie was granted a decree of nullity on 20 July 1854.[6] The previous summer, she, Ruskin, and his protégéJohn Millais had spent four months together in theScottish Highlands, during which time she and Millais formed a close and increasingly intimate bond.[7][c] In early 1854, Millais painted a portrait of Gray for her parents. Through her regular visits to his studio inGower Street, London, where she impressed Millais with her patience,[3] Gray was able to act a go-between with Effie. During this period, Ruskin's mother (to whom her son was close) appears to have indulged Gray, while, at the same time, casting aspersions on Effie, who was under considerable stress.[3] For his part, Ruskin sometimes accompanied Gray on walks, in the course of which he too spoke slightingly of his wife, possibly seeking to turn Gray against her.[1] Effie's surviving letters to her parents suggest that Gray kept her well informed of such adverse criticism.
After the annulment of her marriage, Effie avoided Millais for some time, although he remained in contact with the girls' mother. Effie and Gray, whose governess was not replaced, spent much of the summer atSt Andrews, on the coast of Fife, with their younger sister, Alice Elizabeth Gray (1845–1929).[d] They went for walks together and Effie, who had been well educated herself, acted as her sisters’ teacher.[1] The following year, Millais came up to Bowerswell, where they were married in June 1855.
For the next few years, Gray continued to sit for Millais. After he and Effie moved to Annat Lodge, close to Bowerswell, she was readily available for this purpose, but while it seems she was beginning to displace Effie herself as a favoured subject, it is unsurprising that Effie wanted to keep herself out of the public eye to a degree, following the very public dissolution of her marriage.[e] In the words of art historianSuzanne Fagence Cooper, whose biographical chapter about Gray (2010) provides the fullest account of her life, Gray "changes before our eyes from a child to a stunning teenager."[3] This change can be traced in three works by Millais:Autumn Leaves (1855–56),Spring (orApple Blossoms) (1856–1859) and, most strikingly, in a small, but "unnerving"[3] portrait of her at the age of 13, entitledPortrait of a Young Lady, or simplySophie Gray (1857).[9][f]Charles Edward Perugini also painted a portrait of Gray as a young woman; the date is not known with certainty[10] and for some years it was attributed mistakenly to Millais.[11]
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InAutumn Leaves, Gray is one of four girls beside a smoking bonfire of leaves. Her sister Alice is also in this picture, together with two local girls at the right procured by Effie.[3][g] Of the four, only Gray appears to be verging on womanhood.[12]
In the laterSpring, eight girls (whose ages ranged from 12 to 15) recline in an orchard. Gray is depicted in profile, wearing a colourful, striped robe, with long flowing hair, while Alice lies somewhat provocatively with a blade of grass in her mouth.
Sophie Gray is a sensual, knowing, and direct image, which, almost inevitably, has provoked questions about the nature of Millais's relationship with his sister-in-law. There was undoubtedly a strong affection between them, which may well have grown into mutual infatuation. According toMary Lutyens, who researched the lives of Effie, Ruskin and Millais,[h] it was rumoured that Effie had to send Gray away because of concerns that she and Millais were growing too close; however, there is no clear evidence of a more intimate relationship between them. Gray's parents were content for Millais to chaperone her – for example, on an overnight train to London – and, whatever the truth of any rumour, Effie remained close to her sister and often invited her to stay after she and Millais moved back to London in 1861.[3] When Gray later became ill, Effie visited her frequently.[1]
Unlike Millais's 1854 portrait of Gray, his later work was not kept by the family. It was sold toGeorge Price Boyce, a friend of Millais's Pre-Raphaelite brother,Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who painted a portrait ofFanny Cornforth, a lover he shared with Boyce,[13] to hang alongside that of Gray.[3] EntitledBocca Baciata ("the mouth that has been kissed") after a theme inBoccacio'sDecameron, Rossetti's picture (1859) was described byWilliam Holman Hunt, another member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, as "remarkable for gross sensuality of a revolting kind ... I see Rossetti as advocating as a principle the mere gratification of the eye."[14] As Cooper has remarked, this "after-life" ofSophie Gray demonstrated its "erotic potential."[3] The two pictures, by Millais and Rossetti, hung side-by-side in the exhibition "Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde" when the exhibition was on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., demonstrating two strands of Pre-Raphaelite conceptions of female beauty in, respectively, the forms of realism and Aestheticism.
In 2012Autumn Leaves andSophie Gray, the latter from a private collection, were displayed alongside each other inTate Britain's major exhibition of Pre-Raphaelites,Victorian Avant-Garde.[12]
In 1868 Gray became unwell. It is clear from letters at the time that she was suffering fromanorexia nervosa. She also became restless and obsessed with music, especially piano playing. Her speech was often incoherent. In March 1869 Millais wrote to William Holman Hunt that Gray had "been ill a whole year, and away from home, withhysteria."[citation needed]
At the request of the Grays, Millais placed Gray atChiswick Asylum,Chiswick under the care ofDr Thomas Harrington Tuke (1826–88), a leading practitioner inmental illness.[15] Tuke had treated Millais's friend, the painterEdwin Landseer,[3] and, a year or so after Gray came to him, was involved in the case ofHarriet Mordaunt, respondent in a scandalous divorce action.[15][16] Gray lived with the family of one of Tuke's colleagues until she was well enough to move to lodgings inHammersmith in 1869 and then back to Bowerswell in Perth.[3] Although the state of her health fluctuated, it was to remain a problem for her and a concern to others for the rest of her life.
On 16 July 1873 Gray marriedJames Key Caird (1837–1916), aDundeejute manufacturer[17] who had courted her for several years. Caird was disliked by her family, who thought him two-faced and who were still mindful of Effie's disastrous marriage to Ruskin. They would have been aware also that the port of Dundee had, for some time, been taking trade away from Perth.[1] However, attempts to dissuade Gray from going ahead with the wedding were muted by fears of triggering a further collapse of her health.[3]
The Cairds' only child, Beatrix Ada, was born in 1874.[18] The father was notably absent during Gray's confinement, thereby intensifying bad feeling with her family. In 1875, he forbade Gray from staying with Effie on her way to France[3] and, generally, at a time when his business was expanding, he seems to have been both inconsiderate and uncaring towards her.[citation needed]
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During her final years, Gray spent much of her time alone with Beatrix, mostly living between Dundee and Paris. In 1880 Millais painted a final portrait of her, which was exhibited at the newGrosvenor Gallery.Mary Lutyens wrote of it that Millais "perhaps more than anyone, knew the secrets of Sophie's short life, and in her hauntingly sad expression portrayed an old sadness of his own."[10] The portrait hung in Effie and John Everett Millais's house at Palace Gate, London, and remains in the family.
By the 1880s Gray had become increasingly emaciated (the effects largely hidden from others by the weight of late Victorian clothing), and in 1882 returned to the care of Tuke.[3] She died on 15 March 1882, aged 38. Tuke gave the cause of death as exhaustion and "atrophy of nervous system, 17 years." Rumours that Gray died of suicide have never been substantiated.[1]
Millais painted a lovely portrait of Gray's daughter, Beatrix Caird, in 1879,[19] but she died in 1888 at age 13. James Caird subsequently used his wealth to supportErnest Shackleton'sTrans-Antarctic expedition of 1914–1917, and was a significant benefactor to the city of Dundee.[18] He became abaronet in 1913.[i]
InEmma Thompson's filmEffie Gray, completed in 2013, Sophie is portrayed by Polly Dartford.[20] Effie Gray is played byDakota Fanning.
